Anarchism and Other Essays

A collection of essays and lectures by the anarchist Emma Goldman, published in New York in 1910 by her own Mother Earth Publishing Association. The title essay, 'Anarchism: What It Really Stands For', presents anarchism as a philosophy of freedom unrestricted by man-made law and names religion, property and government as its chief enemies. Other essays argue that creative minorities rather than majorities drive social change, explain political violence as a response to social injustice, condemn prisons as a social crime and failure, and attack patriotism as a menace to liberty that feeds militarism. A group of essays on women, including 'The Traffic in Women', 'Woman Suffrage', 'The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation' and 'Marriage and Love', argues that the vote and paid work will not free women unless they also free themselves from convention, and that marriage is an economic arrangement opposed to love. Critics have disputed her sympathetic account of political violence and her scepticism about suffrage.

It is the most accessible statement of early twentieth-century anarchism, and its essays on women, marriage and prisons still read as sharp social criticism.